Not socialist
"The time is coming when we [the ALP] will either be a socialist party or we will finish up as a muddle-headed, middle-class, petit-bourgeois, status-seeking party." — Former Labor leader Arthur Calwell, in his 1972 memoirs.
People's choice
"I'm not complaining. I'm just wondering what voters were thinking." — Jerry Kobyluk, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate from Oklahoma, who came 2000 votes behind Jacquelyn Ledgerwood, who died a month before the election. The late Ledgerwood is now one of two candidates in a run-off vote.
Who's been scratched?
"It is not a choice of Tweedledum or Tweedledee" — Headline on the election in the August 31 Financial Review.
Have a drink?
"The trouble is that when the two of them sit at a table and look at each other, what are they going to do?" — Brent Scowcroft, former adviser to George Bush, on the Clinton-Yeltsin summit in Moscow.
But good enough for killing
"Some of this is indirect; some of it is inferential. It's hard to hang your hat on any one nugget of it." — A US official, on the "evidence" used to justify Clinton's bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.
What's new?
"The market is now basically a casino." — A share trader employed by a western broker on the Budapest share market, quoted in the August 29 Sydney Morning Herald.
Keep trying
"... in politics from time to time I have exaggerated things, but I have tried to be candid." — Prime Menzies John Howard.
No, Canute was candid
"What is he, King Canute?" — A "small investor", quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald, on Howard's statement that there would be no world recession.